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pryonic writes "The BBC is reporting that more than half of Britons do not believe in evolution, with a further 40% advocating that creationism or intelligent design should be taught in school science classes. I'm a Brit myself, and I thought most people over here thought these views were outdated and lacked substance. None of my close friends give any credit to creationism or ID, but we're all well educated athiests so I guess that's to be expected. Maybe I've been blind to the views of the majority in this proudly secular country?"

On one hand, I'm happy to see that rampant idiocy isn't a uniquely American trait.

You're a complete, myopic idiot to think this in the first place. This "the USA is the only place with stupid people in the world" is astonishing in its hypocrisy. You have whole nations out there with government based on radical, fundamental theology from top to bottom. Or other ones based on outdated theories and economic systems that have been repeatedly demonstrated to be broken.

On the other hand, however, I'm seriously troubled by this. I guess I was kinda counting on the rest of the world to bitchslap America back to sanity sooner or later, but now it appears that we can't count on the global community saving the day for rationality.

Where does this come from? This sort of talk just makes you sound the like the most ignorant fool of all. What makes you and your ilk live this delusion that the world outside the USA is somehow magically enlightened and rational? Have you ever BEEN anywhere? I've been to every continent (visited Antarctica thanks to Linblad Expeditions) multiple times for my job, and the USA is a rank amateur when it comes to irrationality.

But that doesn't mean I think Intelligent Design is science, either. But neither is a whole lot that goes on with Evolution and other supporting theories that are based on something other than experimentation. Fact is, there has never been an experiment with macro-evolution - until there is, Macro-Evolution is simply a theory and, IMO, a weak one at that.

You're right there. Same with Plate Tectonics. I mean, sure, we've found the mid-Atlantic ridge and measured how it's spreading a tiny amount each year, I don't disagree with Micro-Continental-Drift. It's only Macro-Continental-Drift I disagree with. Pangaea? Rubbish. And all the magnetic reversal patterns and matching rock formations on separate continents that the scientists come up with are IMO really weak.

And don't get me started on Macro-Addition. I mean, we know 1+1=2, we can test that by counting things, but AFAIK nobody in the world has ever seen more than a few million of anything at one time. And yet these scientists tell us about billions of this and trillions of that, and then they even make up a new way of writing numbers that doesn't even use names! Exponential notation is only a theory, and IMO, a weak one at that.

Having seen the movie, "Underworld: Evolution", I'm starting to believe that the concept of evolution needs to be banished, if for no other reason than to prevent entertainment companies from coming up with these ideas.

Personally, I don't believe in Evolution. That doesn't make me an idiot. I simply disagree with the theory.

Personally, I don't believe that the square on the hypotenuse of a right-agnled triangle is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides. That doesn't make me innumerate. I simply disagree with the theorem.

Being brittish qualifies me to talk about this, I asked a few friends and some collegues at work and all of them believed in evolution... even the christian who goes to church every weekend thinks that there was a form of evolution.
I'm not sure where/how they got a cross section of the population of this 'survey' but as far as I can see it's not very true.

...Or, put another way, there could be some intelligent programmer "outside" of our universe who created the computing machine that is our universe. Personally, I'm not compelled by such an argument,...

Dont you know ?! The Earth is a supercomputer built by a bunch of mice ? to know the ultimate question for the answer 42...

His (Darwin) theory did not address whether or not God created the initial organisms--it only addressed how organisms have changed over time.

But that is guilty by omission. The Bible states that god made man in his own image.We have evidence that we have evolved from "lesser" mammals, and they evolved from fish/reptiles, and they evolved from (initially) single celled lifeforms.

It would "tend" to falsify ID? I don't know what you meant by that, but it wouldn't be true that such an experiment would falsify ID.

Because when one reasons about the physical sciences one uses inductive reasoning. If this bacterium is susceptable to penicillin and that bacterium is susceptable to penicillin and the other bacterium is susceptable to penicillin, maybe all bacteria are susceptable to penicillin. On the other hand, maybe they were susceptible to the alcohol used to suspend the penicillin and drowned. (I'm sorry. I'm no expert in the biological sciences, so maybe bacteria aren't susceptible to alcohol. It's not germain to the argument I present.) It's only in the mathematical sciences that we can prove, given certain axioms and methods of inference, that for examle there is no largest prime number.

Believers in ID did not become so by looking at the strong and weak nuclear forces.

So you believe that a statement is true or false depending on how the proponents of the statement came to examine it? If I could give you one example of a person who believes Intelligent Design by examining the strong and weak nuclear forces, would you then come to believe Intelligent Design?

The suggestion that a single development (in an area of physics that most of these people don't even know about) could change their minds is either naive or dishonest.

Who has made such a suggestion?

The only way to disprove ID is to solve all of the unknowns in science, to such a degree that ID believers can no longer quibble over the definition of the word "theory". Personally I don't believe that's possible.

I note that the way Newtonian physics was disproved was through Einstein's theory of relativity (The General one, I think, but I'm not certain.) I note that scores of physicists are trying to disprove the theory of relativity at this moment. Would you similarly claim that the only way to disprove Einstein's general theory of relativity is to solve all the unknowns in science to such a degree that ToR believers can no longer quibble over the definition of the word "theory?" If not, why not?

If you actually knew what you were talking about, you would know that Jesus wasn't "sharing" one peice of bread with many, nor was he demonstrating his power. The lesson has nothing to do with "good will towards your fellow man."

The people were all bitching and moaning that Jesus was a bit of a windbag and they were hungry, so Jesus grabs this kid who has a loaf of bread and (miraculously) gives everyone a peice. The people stick around to hear one more dissertation because there is now free food.

The lesson he was trying to teach was that if your going to demand everyone show up at your meeting, you sure as hell better bring donuts.